In 2007, the National Book Trust published a collection of Sri Lankan Short Stories I had edited, entitled ‘Bridging Connections’. Typically, it has not sold well in this country. This is a pity, because it also introduced stories written originally in Sinhala and Tamil. It would have been good for at least the English speaking who did not know one or other of those languages to appreciate thoughts they otherwise could not register.

In India the book has done very well, and is being translated into all the other official Indian languages. I have since been asked to compile a similar collection of poetry, a task I was more worried about, given the much greater knowledge required to judge the merits of poetry in languages in which one is not a literary expert. However, I have received much assistance from friends, and strangers to whose kindness I am indebted.

Cyril Leonard Wickremesinghe was the fifth son in his family, the sixth child. The eldest was the only girl, Maud, who married a Wijesinghe in a practice that was to be repeated over three generations.

All the children survived into at least middle-age, though only one went on into the sixties so that I can actually remember seeing him. This was Basil, the Public Works Department Inspector, who had two wives and eight children. The Wickremesinghes were all prolific breeders, so that my mother had 33 cousins on her father’s side, in addition to her three brothers. On the other, the Goonewardene side, she had just one, Lakshmi, the daughter of Leo, the favourite uncle of my childhood. He had dutifully left the police when his father and his brother Hugh died, to look after for nearly half a century the estates and the Old Placein Kurunagala.

If Colombo was changing only slowly in the seventies from the sleepy city it had been before, social revolution was in full swing. The early seventies had seen the introduction of standardization with regard to university admission, and this had hit Colombo hard. Mine was the first year affected by the change and, whereas most of my sister’s schoolfriends, just one year senior to us, were in university in Sri Lanka (as the country now was officially), many of mine had gone abroad. Practically none of those were to come back permanently.

Others had gone into the private sector, and were doing well, earning much more than those of us with degrees could. Thus, as always, the Colombo elite rode out this storm, and in some cases benefited from what had been intended as social engineering on behalf of those less fortunate. But the children of Jaffna, the other District worst affected, fared much worse.

My grandparents moved into Lakmahal some seventeen years after they were married. Till then they had not had a house of their own. He was a member of the Ceylon Civil Service, and had served for quarter of a century in different areas of the country.

Having joined the CCS in 1912, when he was twenty two, Cyril Wickremesinghe had risen rapidly. By 1920 he was Asst Revenue Officer in Mannar, the first Ceylonese to be appointed to such a position of responsibility, The year before that he had married the eighteen year old Esme Goonewardene, in what she always indicated was a deeply romantic affair.